1 I have sound but no picture; it's only 4 yrs old; I am cranky about the mayfly lifespan of electronic goods these days.

ION, jamethiel_bane is doing a "post every day" meme, and I thought I'd do my own version, using her prompts, but maybe adapting some to suit me, and probably being far more erratic.

1. What do you prefer to be called by folks reading the entry? Who named you that and why? Where did it come from?

My fandom name is china shop, AKA china AKA Ms Shop. Even offline, in fannish circles I go by china.

It originates from an Ani DiFranco lyric (from the song "You Had Time"), via my pre-fandom blog, which was titled "you are a china shop, I am a bull". In 2007 I wrote on LJ:

Pre-fandom I was a different person online, and while I'm no less me now, well, livejournal is a slightly uncomfortable stage (in the performance sense) for me. The "push" of my entries appearing in your friends' list, as opposed to the "pull" of someone seeking them out. If I'm collected together, I'm more likely to cohere, but in general I suspect I'm a couple of tiles in a mosaic.

I first chose this name as a disclaimer -- you are a china shop, i am a bull -- and then accidentally claimed the fragile part as my identity. Possibly prescient.

The first paragraph of which seems adorably quaint now, in the face of tumblr and reblogging and posts running wild.

Obviously for data protection reasons I can't go into much detail about the responses FCC got to the end of conference survey, but I do want to highlight one small area:

The impressive number of you who said Glee was the best fringe event, and the smaller but still impressive number who said we were the best thing about conference full stop, and the hardy few who said the best way to improve conference would be to have more Glee, and the one dear sweet soul who said Glee was their main reason for coming to conference?

I am genuinely touched and I love you all. Thank you. It makes it absolutely worth trying to chair a debate with a hangover and a sore throat first thing in the morning after. You guys rule.

Sexual violence against women and girls is endemic. There's an absolute mountain of evidence that this is the case, from the experiences of my friends to any number of posts on social media to rigorous studies. A big part of the reason I decided to identify as a feminist is because women are routinely denied bodily autonomy and feminism seems to be the only political movement that cares about this.

I absolutely believe everybody else's experiences, people I know and strangers writing brave, brave columns and blog posts. I am just a total outlier, and I really shouldn't be. So I'm signal boosting others' accounts, because I know that I needed to be made aware of the scale of the problem, and perhaps some other people reading this could also use the information.

2. Takeout Chinese for lunch with sanj on the spur of the moment. With bonus kitten sitting on the chair at the head of the table, and periodically sticking his head up over the edge of the table to see if we would let him eat our chicken. (Which we wouldn't.)

3. The new mini-season of Voltron went live this past weekend! Kiddo and sanj and I watched half of it last night, and it's delightful.

4. Yesterday I roasted some delicata squash (seasoned with salt and pepper and curry powder) and then roasted the seeds (boiled briefly, then seasoned the same way.) It pleases me to have turned something I would ordinarily have thrown away into tasty snack food.

5. Dinner for tonight is already made, so when I get home from work around 5:30 I can mostly relax. There's work I need to do, but if I don't do it tonight, nothing will catch on fire.

Could it be? Did I just finish another chapter of When the Rest of Heaven Was Blue, the Buffy/Spike fic that I started in 2008? Yes, yes I did. It took me four years, and the chapter is very short, but the penultimate chapter of this albatross of a fic is finally ready. And in need of a beta. Any volunteers?

Hey, maybe I'll manage to actually finish this thing before its tenth anniversary!

Funnily, it's actually thanks to Doctor Who that this fic progressed. One of the reasons why I haven't been writing much Buffy fic in the last few years is because my main writing fandom has been The Mentalist, and my Buffy voice was too much like my Lisbon voice. I couldn't hear Buffy's voice in my head without contantly turning into Lisbon, and I can't really write a character unless I can hear them. But I've been working on a Doctor Who fic for a ficathon for the last few weeks, which seems to have cleared the Lisbon voice from my head, and now I could finally return to this fic and not keep thinking that Buffy sounded too much like Lisbon.

(of course, as I was writing this post, I realised that both this chapter of "When the Rest..." and the Doctor/Clara fic I'm working on are yet another variation of the male sleeps and the female watches... Because apparently there's exactly one romantic plotline I can write for het couples)

Romeo and Juliet are also idiotic teenagers who do something incredibly stupid and kill themselves at the end of the story. I thought it would be interesting to start with two people who are adults and not idiotic teenagers. Instead of killing themselves, they have lots of hot sex. But then the result of that sex is a baby. -- Brian K. Vaughan